Huey Newton

Huey Newton was one of the founding
members of the Black Panther movement that
radicalised the civil rights campaign in America. The
FBI was to label Newton and his colleagues in the Black Panthers as ‘Public
Enemy Number One’.

Huey Newton was born on February 17th,
1942, in Monroe, Louisiana. In 1945, the family moved to Oakland, California, in
an effort to take advantage of job opportunities there. The area around Oakland
had seen industrial growth as a result of the requirements for WorldWar Two. However, the racism that would have existed
in Louisiana at the time the family lived there was not changed for harmony in
Oakland, where the family also experienced racism, though possibly not as
overtly as in Louisiana.

Newton found school difficult as he felt
that he was made to be ashamed of his colour. He frequently got into trouble
with school authorities and was suspended on a number of occasions.

“All
they (the teachers) did was to try to rob me of the sense of my own
uniqueness and worth, and in the process they nearly killed my urge to
inquire.” (Newton)

Newton left high school barely literate
but wanted to prove to those who classed him as a failure, that they were wrong.
He taught himself to read by studying poetry and he went to college where he
gained an Associate of Arts degree. Newton also studied law at Oakland City
College and at the San Francisco Law School.

However, to finance his studies, Newton
took to burglary – something he had also done as a teenager. When he was 22,
he was arrested and found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon. He received a
six-month jail sentence in a county jail. He spent most of this time in solitary
confinement.

While at Oakland City College, Newton
became politicised. He read the writings of MaoZedong,
Ché Guevara and Malcolm X. With
no party around Oakland to represent the black community there, Newton, along
with Bobby Seale, started the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence in October
1966, which would represent the black community. Better known just as the Black
Panthers, the organisation became organised and militant. The chairman was
Seale and Newton was the ‘minister of defence’.

The Black Panthers first targeted the police of
Oakland. They believed that the police had a history of harassing the black
community of the city and they decided to police the police to ensure that the
black community got a fair deal from them. The Constitution gave American
citizens the “right to be arms” and this is exactly what the Black Panthers
did.

Newton, along with Seale, wrote the
’Black Panther Party Platform and Program’ which laid out what the Black
Panthers wanted – full employment for the black American community, full civil
rights, good housing, good educational facilities etc. It was how these desires
were to be achieved that worried the authorities. The FBI infiltrated the
movement and provided Hoover, the head of the FBI, with intelligence reports
regarding the violent intentions of the Black Panthers. In October 1967, Newton
was accused of murdering an Oakland police officer – John Frey. In the
following year (September 1968) he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and
sentenced to two to fifteen years in prison. In May 1970, this sentence was
overturned and a new trial for Newton was ordered. After two more trials, the
case against Newton was dropped. There were legal technicalities to this such as
the judge failing to provide the jury with proper instructions, but to those in
the Black Panther movement the final acquittal seemed to justify their belief
that the system was against them and that the accusation against Newton had been
a fraud all along, with higher powers attempting to frame him so that the
movement would falter without one of its leaders and lose any credibility it had
within the black community.

After his release from prison, Newton
changed the direction of the movement. While Newton was in prison, membership of
the Black Panthers had declined and the FBI had done a great deal to tarnish its
reputation. Newton targeted community issues within the black community that he
felt needed addressing. The movement provided free breakfasts for children,
provided free shoes and sponsored a school.

However, controversy continued to follow
Newton. In 1974, he was accused of murdering a 17-year old prostitute, Kathleen
Smith. He failed to turn up in court and jumped bail. For three years he lived
in Cuba but returned to America in 1977 to face a murder charge. Newton believed
that the climate had changed in America and that he was more likely to get a
fair trial. After two trials, he was acquitted Smith’s murder.

In 1978, Newton studied for a Ph.D at
the University of California. By now the violent activism of the Black Panthers
had lessened. But controversy was never far away. In 1985, Newton was arrested
for stealing federal and state money that had been paid into the Black
Panther’s community education and nutrition fund. In 1989, he faced the same
charge of embezzlement from the funds of a school set-up by the Black Panthers.
It is said that Newton did this to fund his alcohol and drug addictions.

On August 22nd, 1989, Huey Newton,
aged 47, was shot dead, apparently by a drug dealer in a drug deal that went
wrong.